Garten Linke is a small garden and landscape construction company from Wiesbaden. Jonathan Linke started his business five years ago as a weekend job besides his full-time position in forestry. Soon more and more customers wanted their garden to be created by Garten Linke. So Jonathan made the decision to grow his own company and gave up his former job. Today he is joined by two employees. All that is missing to his company was his visual appearance. So, for our bachelor thesis our task was to create a fitting corporate design and a website for the young business.

Research

Looking at the competitors in the field of garden and landscape construction, almost every rival chose a shade of green as corporate colour. In the matter of colour no competing company stands out. Even when looking at their range of services everyone offers the same. Especially a lot of the smaller companies do not have a concept for their communication.

In Germany every second household has a garden. For most of the 35.62 million garden owners the garden is of high importance as nearly half of them use it daily. The favorite garden activities are sun bathing, having a barbecue and spending time with friends and family. Gardening is not that much liked by every garden owner. Therefore we see an opportunity in emphasizing the leisure (and not the work) aspect in our communication.

Based on surveys, statistics and the sinus milieu model we defined four types of personas. There is the Modern Performer, who is reached by digital media and cares for new technology in his garden. The second persona is the Postmaterialist, who likes to grow his own fruit and veg and is addressed with eco-friendly materials and tools. The Established Upper Class wants a unique garden design to maintain and improve their image. The last persona is the Old Established who likes everything traditional, tried and tested. The Old Established is best to be addressed by print media. Each of the four personas has their own life style. That is why we developed different advertising materials for each one.

Concept

The concept for Garten Linke is based on our former research. To stand out of the field of competitors we want Garten Linke to promise their customers individual garden design, personal treatment and reliability. According to that Garten Linke's appearance should be young, friendly, creative and courteous. Garten Linke's brand essence is to fill gardens with life. We want a garden more than just a green space attached to a house. The brand adds more value to a garden, it is not just a garden. Garten Linke makes the garden to the center of life, it creates places to share beautiful moments with each other, places to have a great time.

Design

All of the design elements for Garten Linke have to visualise the brand's essence of filling gardens with life. Therefore the imagery shows photographs of garden scences like an inviting tea table under a tree, laughing children running though the garden and long summer barbecues with families enjoying themselves. The images are shot in a warm light and show details just as well as wide-angle views.

A garden is not only green. Blossoms in different colours make a garden exciting. To stand out of our competitors we chose a light, refreshing red as our main colour. It picks up the warm light of the photographs and goes together with is harmonically. The secondary colours are lighter shades of the red, a magenta as highlight tone and a dark purple as contrast.

Letters are constructed just as gardens that are man-made natural areas. To show our brand essence of filling gardens with life we bring an organic movement into the letters of the Garten Linke, that seem to develop and grow naturally. Basically our logo comes to life. We created several logo versions because nature grows at random and so does our logo. The organic shape in our logo is a recognition feature that we pick up in our media. As a further decorative element we designed a pattern with the organic shapes from the Garten Linke logo.

Media

Stationery and business cards are printed on a high-quaity, uncoated paper in a lighter shade of the main red. The van is covered in the remarkable pattern.

If Garten Linke has a construcition site, there may be smaller interruptions for the neighborhood. To apologize for any possible inconvenience in advance, we designed an apology card to be directly posted into the mailbox of the neighbours. This apology card is so low in cost. However, it can have a big influence. Neighbours might talk to the garden owner with the construction site and get a direct testimonial. In the best case the Garden owner is satisfied and gives a recommendation for Garten Linke. The apology card is especially addressed to the persona in the Established Upper Class as in their social milieu a lot of contracts are awarded by recommendation.

Nearly every product is branded today. But how can we brand a garden? Our solution is a stone with an engraved Garten Linke logo. The stone can be chosen to fit thematically into the garden environment of the owner. Questions from garden visitors to the owner are guaranteed and hopefully Garten Linke is recommended.

For a lot of customers it is hard to imagine what their future garden will look like just from seeing the plan in front of them and listening to the wise words of the garden planner. A solution for that can be virtual reality garden. First of all the garden has to be photographed with a 360 degree panorama image. This 'before' image can then be manipulated with photoshop just as the plan from the landscape architects intends. Now the customer can see his garden before it is even created by using a virtual reality cardboard and his mobile phone. The virtual reality garden is targeted at the Modern Performer persona, that is open to new technology and interest in digital media.

To improve our customer loyalty we designed the customer magazine 'Nachgeharkt' (german for digging deeper). It covers subjects such as recipes from garden fruits, tips for correct way to clip bushes and the newest trends in garden design.